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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with Clinton on the campaign trail in Florida.
Orlando Sentinel reports:
“I think as people really consider their choice in the next three months, I think it’s pretty clear which of us is actually going to help grow the economy, create more opportunity, get incomes rising, and who is not,” Clinton told the crowd of about 3,000 people at the Exhibition Hall at the Osceola Heritage Park.
The rally was her first true campaign event in Central Florida since the March primary, following a visit to Orlando in July to meet privately with family and friends of Pulse nightclub shooting victims.
“I want them to know that we will be with you,” she said. “We will be with you as you rebuild your lives, as you rebuild hope for the future. Because we can't ever let that kind of hatred and violence break the spirit and break the soul of any place in America.”
"Of all the places in America to invest in clean , renewable energy, you'd think Florida would be at the top of the list, right?" Clinton said. "I'm sad to tell you, that's not happening. Your governor directed state government ... never to say or write the words 'climate change.' "
"Climate change is real, whether your governor or Donald Trump want to admit it or not,” she said.
Tampa Bay Times reports:
Visiting a local brewery emphasized her message that small businesses, not big corporations, are her priority. It didn't hurt that she hit that note on a day Donald Trump delivered a big speech on his economic agenda.
Clinton's friends say she prefers discussing wonky policies in small groups than headlining campaign rallies.
At 3 Daughters, she seemed positively excited about the anything-but-exciting suggestions she heard from Mike and Leigh Harting.
"Right now, employees spend a lot of time figuring out excise tax, which is pretty complicated, and I want to try to blow through all that, simplify it, flatten it, make it possible for companies like this to get the information," Clinton told the reporters, 3 Daughters employees and other guests. "And they came up with a really good suggestion: People who register LLCs, if they're going to have employees, they should immediately get a package of information, like here's how you can get help understanding what you have to do to register in different jurisdictions to pay taxes in different jurisdictions and the like."
Clinton told the crowd that Trump's economic agenda is repackaged trickle down economics.
"His tax plans would give super big tax breaks to large corporations and the really wealthy. ...I have said throughout this campaign I am not going to raise the taxes on the middle class, but with your help we are going to raise it on the wealthy."
Clinton was asked how she will prepare Americans for the technology jobs of tomorrow.
Quora has her answer:
Technology is rapidly transforming our economy, and with the right public policies, we can harness American innovation to create good-paying jobs, stay globally competitive, and improve quality of life for all Americans. Here’s how I propose we do it:
First, we need to educate and train our workforce for the jobs of the future. As president, I’ll build on President Obama’s Computer Science Education for All initiative to make sure all public school students can take rigorous computer science and STEM classes. I’ve proposed a plan to recruit up to 50,000 new computer science teachers in the next decade. I’ll expand support for linked-learning and other models that help students develop key skills while they are still in high school. And under my New College Compact, students will have expanded access to federal support for technical skills-training programs. The bottom line is this: Every American of every age should have the chance to get the skills they need to succeed.
We also have to invest in the entrepreneurs and small businesses that drive innovation. I want hubs like Silicon Valley to emerge all over the country, especially in underserved communities. I’m committed to supporting start-up incubators and accelerators, providing tax relief to small businesses, and increasing access to capital—especially for minority- and women-owned small businesses and start-ups. And my tech and innovation plan will let aspiring entrepreneurs put their student-loan debt payments and interest on hold while they get their ventures off the ground.
Finally, it is critical that we strengthen support for scientific and technical research. I’ll make dramatic new investments across key government agencies engaging in this groundbreaking work, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation to our national labs and more. For example, it’s important that we invest in the next generation of wireless networks to support budding technologies that have the potential to create new industries, improve public health and safety, and save lives.
And I’m committed to ramping up our funding for biomedical research and development, including $2 billion per year for Alzheimer’s research, which is the amount leading researchers say will be necessary to effectively treat the disease and make a cure possible by 2025. We also need to do much more to support research into clean-energy solutions that can help combat climate change and make America the world’s clean energy superpower. We live in a world with so many challenges, but also with unparalleled opportunities to make new discoveries—discoveries that lead to new products, new services, and even new industries that create jobs and make us happier, healthier, and more productive. As president, I will make sure that the United States continues to lead in that effort.
So “establishment insurgency” is now a thing?
Bloomberg reports:
Hillary Clinton's campaign is not exactly the same thing as Hillary Clinton. The woman herself is a paragon of the establishment, a fixture of the last quarter century of American politics, an insider, familiar both as a political personality and as an experienced purveyor of political goods and services.
The campaign is that and something more.
Clinton's campaign promises to be a consolidation of the Obama presidency. It is dependent on the Obama coalition, but it's also an extension of it. She has placed Hispanic immigrants at the center of the cause, promising she'll go beyond Obama's efforts in their behalf. And by its very existence, her campaign affirms and elevates women everywhere in a way that Obama's presidency could not.
In effect, Clinton is an insider candidate whose campaign is supported by outsiders eager not to destroy the system, but to make it work for them. It's a traditional, familiar political insurgency, powered by the yearnings of newly muscular constituencies.
Obama's presidency has been a landmark in the ever-expanding definition of "us." When the president speaks, as he often does, of the interminable work of perfecting the union, he is talking in part about perfecting, by expanding, the meaning of "us." The success of his presidency -- unemployment is under 5 percent and his approval is solidly above 50 percent -- enables Clinton to follow his lead.
Huffington Post finds thirteen lessons for working women in Clinton’s success. Here are the first four:
So, what can women learn from Hillary’s (HRC) journey? Here are my thoughts:
1. Over-prepare: Do your homework and walk in more prepared that you think you need to be. It’ll give you confidence as well as credibility, and you can address anything thrown in your path with aplomb.
2. Be over-qualified: Women have to be far more qualified than their male counterparts in order to ascend professionally, unfortunately. Like her or not, HRC’s résumé shows she’s eminently qualified to be President.
3. Reinvent yourself: As circumstances, players and your priorities change, be flexible and take on new projects, new jobs, new relationships and new perspectives in order to grow and succeed. Changing your mind on issues as you have new experiences and information means you’re growing.
4. Stretch yourself: Take on and ask for assignments and jobs that will challenge you. Women tend to be promoted on performance (vs. men on potential, don’t get me started on that), so women need to prove their ability to do “it.” Think differently, ask for stretch projects and jobs, and develop new skills.
Washington Post notices the enthusiasm gap:
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll is the latest to show Clinton surging to a big lead in the presidential race. And a large reason for that is that Democrats have quickly rallied to her cause. Today, 63 percent of Democrats say they have a "strongly favorable" opinion of Clinton. That number is up a whopping 21 points from less than a month ago, and it's the highest it has been since 2012, when Clinton was a popular secretary of state.
Her overall numbers haven't ticked up that much — the Post-ABC poll shows her favorable/unfavorable split among registered voters at a pedestrian 46/52 — but the rallying effect among Democrats is particularly notable because it hasn't been a given. Just two weeks ago at this time, some Bernie Sanders supporters were trying to throw the Democratic National Convention into disarray, and the narrative was all about a divided Democratic Party.
Clinton's rise among Democrats is also in stark contrast to Republican enthusiasm for Trump. While 63 percent of Democrats say they feel strongly favorable about Clinton, just 36 percent of Republicans have a "strongly favorable" view of their nominee. And the 27-point gap between Democrats who really like Clinton and Republicans who really like Trump suggests a pretty significant enthusiasm gap.
Clinton’s rising poll numbers indicate her post-convention bounce isn’t fading yet.
FiveThirtyEight reports:
Hillary Clinton’s polling surge is showing no signs of fading. She leads Donald Trump, on average, by about 7 percentage points in national polls, and is an 83-percent favorite to win on Nov. 8, according to our polls-only model. Our polls-plus model — which accounts for the “fundamentals,” as well as the tendency for a candidate’s numbers to temporarily rise after his or her convention — gives her a 76 percent chance. Those are her largest advantages since we launched our election forecasts back in June.
But it’s also possible that Clinton’s strong numbers aren’t solely the result of a fleeting post-convention afterglow. As my colleague Nate Silver pointed out on Friday, Trump’s recent struggles — his attacks on the Khan family and feuds with Republican leadership, for instance — could be inflicting more durable damage to his chances. Trump is the least-liked major party nominee in modern history. Perhaps the conventions and their aftermath, when many voters presumably tuned into the 2016 race for the first time, established a new equilibrium. Perhaps this is 1988 all over again, with the parties reversed.
In 1988, Republican George H.W. Bush, looking to succeed an increasingly popular Ronald Reagan and give his party a third term in the White House, was trailing Democrat Michael Dukakis going into the conventions. But the conventions reset the race. Immediately after the conventions, Bush led Dukakis by an average of about 6 percentage points. In November, Bush defeated Dukakis by 8 points. Now, this year could end up being very different than 1988. Like Bush in 1988, however, Clinton is trying to replace a two-term president from her party whose popularity has been growing.
It is demographics, of course, that are sinking Trump’s candidacy. He’s trailing Mitt Romney’s numbers across the board, even among white voters.
Washington Post reports:
Donald Trump's argument for his viability has always been that he will inspire white working-class voters, including Democrats, to come out to the polls for him in droves. That's been his strategy for responding to the shift toward a more diverse electorate, and it seems to be why he has insisted (if he no longer does) that states like his home of New York might be in play (which it isn't).
The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, though, shows that Trump's actually doing worse than recent Republican candidates with white voters, not better. Given how the electorate has shifted, that alone could doom his candidacy. But that problem doesn't stand alone.
Right now, Trump's biggest problem is on gender. He's doing better with men than Mitt Romney did four years ago, according to the new Post/ABC poll, but far worse with women. When George W. Bush won in 2000 — barely — he did so with an 11-point advantage among men and an 11-point disadvantage among women, with women comprising about 52 percent of the electorate (according to exit polling). In his reelection, he narrowly lost women. Right now, Trump's doing worse with women than Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush or Bob Dole did.
Slate takes a look at Republican women who are supporting Hillary:
When Eleanor Schiff, a former domestic policy staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, contemplates her impending vote for Hillary Clinton, she says she’s “stunned.” “If you told me a year ago that I’d be voting for her, I’d say there’s no way,” Schiff tells me. “But I feel that I have to. She’ll do the job. She’s eminently qualified.”
In the past week, four high-profile Republican women have come out in favor of Clinton: longtime Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw, former Chris Christie aide Maria Comella, Hewlett Packard executive Meg Whitman, and former George W. Bush aide Lezlee Westine. None of these women, by themselves, is likely to sway many votes: But they represent a broader distaff repudiation of Trump, who continues to lead with men. “Most Republican women will vote for Trump, because I think most Republicans will vote for Trump,” says Katie Packer, Mitt Romney’s 2012 deputy campaign manager. “Partisan Republican women tend to act more like partisans than they do like women. But I don’t think he will win Republican women with the numbers that Bush, McCain, and Romney did, and that’s where these elections are won and lost: on the margins.”
Packer says there are several categories of anti-Trump Republican women. Some, she says, “are just giving up on the Republican Party and are saying look, I’ve tried, and now they’ve gone and nominated this guy, I give up. I’m going to go be a Democrat.” Others will vote for Clinton because they think Trump is dangerous—but will return to the GOP after this election. Finally, she says, there are people like her, who can’t see themselves voting for either Trump or Clinton. “I can’t support Trump, but that doesn’t mean I like Hillary any better,” Packer says, “and I want to stick around to try and help rebuild the party. We still hold hope for the party. There’s very broad disgust with Trump, and people are deciding how to handle it in different ways.”
Meanwhile, a Republican dad writes to his young daughter:
Tessa,
Guess what, mommy and have an update about the election. Last night during the Democratic National Convention (Hillary Clinton’s event), Hillary was officially nominated.
This is Hillary’s opportunity to become the first female President of the United States of America. This is a big event in our history.
This shows that you can do anything you put your mind too. This shows that strong young girls like you can become strong young women who make a difference in our world.
By the way, I told mommy that I can no longer support the Party I have always known. I cannot accept the message of hate and fear Donald Trump presents. I have officially sent my application to change political parties (mommy was very happy).
This is our future and we need to stand united (this is why we are the UNITED STATES of AMERICA).
Daddy
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.